A Law the Rabbis Said Never Applied

Re'eh legislates the case of an entire Israelite town whose inhabitants turn to idol worship, commanding that such a condemned city (ir hanidachat) be utterly destroyed along with all its property (Deuteronomy 13:13-19). The Mishnah's tractate Sanhedrin surrounds the law with conditions so exacting, requiring, among other things, that a majority of the town's residents be idolaters and that the specific legal warnings and witnesses required for individual capital cases be independently established for every single inhabitant, that a well known rabbinic statement concludes the law 'never was and never will be,' existing in the Torah only so that its lesson could be studied rather than to be carried out.

Source critics generally read this law, together with Re'eh's demand that sacrifice be offered only at the divinely chosen place, as part of Deuteronomy's sustained programme against rival worship, whether foreign gods or unauthorised local shrines, a concern many scholars connect to the same historical setting proposed for Deuteronomy's centralisation law more broadly, a kingdom seeking to eliminate competing religious loyalties rather than a wilderness generation facing an immediate practical threat.